Lightroom Tip – Moving Presets

Way back I posted a video on organizing presets because your preset list in Lightroom can get pretty unwieldy if you don’t start using descriptively named folders to keep them in (ooops, did I just say “descriptively named folders”?… sorry, inside joke )
Anyway, what do you do if you didn’t put your presets in the folder you want in the first place? No sweat. You can move ‘em. Just click on a preset and drag it into the folder you want. Here’s the trick though. Let’s say you have a really long preset list and you can’t see the folder name in your preset view. Then just drag the preset to the top or bottom of the panel edges (shown here).

It’s a little tricky at first, but if you drag slowly you’ll see the panel “catches” and starts scrolling. If you drag up too far or down too far, nothing will happen so make sure you drag slowly and you’ll be able to then drag it into another folder without going outside of Lightroom to reorganize things.

Matt is the full-time Director of Education for Kelby Media Group and a Tampa-based photographer. He's the Editor-in-Chief of Lightroom Magazine, the lead instructor on the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom LIVE Seminar Tour and author of several best-selling Photoshop books. Matt also hosts the world's top Lightroom blog, LightroomKillerTips.com, where he's built up a massive library of Lightroom videos, presets and tips. In addition to teaching Photoshop, Lightroom and photography seminars around the world, he's an instructor at Photoshop World and one of the full-time staff writers for Photoshop User Magazine.

Hi Frank – check out my latest video here: http://lightroomkillertips.com/?p=5037
I mention in the beginning of the video that LR4 presets will work just fine in LR5. They’re compatible and will work the same. They’ll get moved automatically when you upgrade.

You can also do the same with folders and collections in the left panel as well as your keyword list in the right panel – assuming you use hierarchical keywords. It can be a bit tricky waiting for the panel to scroll if you are moving something a long way. In some cases there are also some other sneaky underhanded tricks you can pull to accomplish the same thing without using click & drag.